aan het woord: studenten en docenten

David Bissett

The level of work that is expected at TU Delft is quite high in terms of quality and understanding but, at the same time it is not overwhelming

I did a Bachelor of Science in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. I heard about TU Delft through some of my professors in Cape Town. After doing some further research about it myself, I was very impressed with the Embedded Systems programme and the ranking of TU Delft. When I found out about the companies that were connected to this university, this was the cherry on top and I decided that I had to choose TU Delft.

This is perfect for me, because I can learn many new things while receiving the necessary guidance from the lecturers.

What is special to me about this master programme is that there is a wide variety of courses to choose from. This gives me the freedom to take the electives that I want and essentially build my own degree.

I particularly enjoyed doing the course Network Security and I would highly recommend this course. It covers all aspects of network security: from the actual physical nature of the cables and security precautions, as well the intricacies of the different networking protocols and operating systems and the implications of how they interact.

TU Delft is not just about the academics. There are also many societies and committees that you can join. I've had a lot of fun joining some committees, and have made some great friends at the same time.

After my studies I would like to stay in the Netherlands for a few years to work in one of the major companies taking embedded software engineers such as Bosch or Philips.

Laura Donadoni

I had the opportunity to learn a lot and also to follow my interests

My name is Laura, I am from Milano (Italy) where I studied Electronics Engineering at Politecnico di Milano...

I have been attending this Master since September 2017 and I am fully satisfied with it. I had the opportunity to learn a lot and also to follow my interests. I also discovered I like working in teams on projects because it helps you to watch things from different points of view and this is a great way to improve yourself. Sometimes it is hard working with people with a different culture than yours, but this is part of the challenge.

Another thing that was really impressive, at least for me, was the relationship with professors: you can always be honest with them, even if you have a different idea; you can openly talk with them and they will always be happy to listen to you. As far as I remember, every course I attended, the professors asked us students to participate and to share our ideas, that is one of the things that I love the most from this university.

Dmitry Burlyaev

Embedded Systems at TU Delft is a flexible programme and a lot depends on you.

These days I am working as Senior R&D engineer at Synopsys, Inc. Several projects I am involved in are about hardware static analysis and formal verification. Everything, starting from algorithm optimization and model checking, and finishing with statistical analysis and AI, can be used to make our products better and to develop new tools for EDA industry. Interestingly, almost all techniques I am using now were included in my electives at TU Delft. At that point, I took them just for the sake of curiosity...

This and many other courses “from the future” gave me a new vision of technical problems and courage to combine the learnt techniques. I did my MSc thesis at an aerospace company in Delft analyzing fault-tolerance of satellite systems by emulation. The research-oriented project pushed me to continue this work at Inria Research Institute, France. TU Delft gave me a practical engineering way of thinking; combined with hard work, this “make-it-work” attitude lead me first to a patent, PhD degree, and, later, to my current R&D job.

Embedded Systems at TU Delft is a flexible programme and a lot depends on you. You can go to IoT security, SoC design, distributed algorithms domain – all doors are open. Choose your future, take courses for that, work hard, and you will be the creator of new tools and corporations. I advise you to do project-based courses: in 5 years you will not remember the 2nd Chapter of Computer Architecture book but the experience and fun to complete mini-projects with your classmates will stay with you forever.

Jacco van der Spek

afgestudeerd in 2014 werkzaam als Lead Engineer bij ALTEN Nederland

Looking back on my study at TU Delft I appreciate the solid base that you build for tackling engineering problems.

After graduating in Embedded Systems at TU Delft, in 2014, I started working as a Software Consultant at ALTEN. The same company as where I had just finished my graduation project in the robotics field. ALTEN is a leading company in Technology Consulting and Engineering. At ALTEN we are working on projects in the fields of Technical Software, Mechatronics, Software Testing and Business Intelligence. During my graduation project I had a nice opportunity to get a behind the scenes impression of the company...

I would recommend everyone to graduate at a company, you gain a lot of practical experience and probably you will end up with a job.

The great thing about working at ALTEN is the diversity of projects. In the past couple of years I have been working as Embedded Software Engineer in quite diverse projects concerning trains, smart strollers, radars and medical devices. Currently I'm Lead Engineer in a project that is developing a new type of wearable. The development is done within a project that is funded by the EU and involves companies from all over Europe. These different companies and their own culture makes it a very interesting project, besides from the cutting edge technology involved of course. Being a Lead Engineer I'm besides developing software busy with all kinds of project management tasks like planning, communication with partner companies and discussing requirements.

Looking back on my study at TU Delft I appreciate the solid base that you build for tackling engineering problems. The different courses that I took during my Master make that I can be up to speed in all kind of different projects really quickly. It also enables me to talk with all kind of engineers because we speak the same technical language. If I would have to give one advice: enjoy the time at university, there will never be a time again in which you can take so many interesting courses!

Koen Langendoen

The combination of small, resource-scarce devices and the error-prone nature of wireless communications constitutes an interesting research challenge

...

He is developing an Android app that participants can install on their smartphones, thus allowing researchers to use it, as one of a large pool, to run novel software on as many phones as possible in order to speed up the development cycle.

This example is typical of the ES group's philosophy of conducting experimental research. In this vision, it is fine to develop high-level concepts, but it is only by implementing them on real hardware that we can discover whether they can withstand the many intricacies of embedded systems found in practice.

Accordingly, students in the MSc programme in Embedded Systems receive hands-on training through a variety of projects and labs, of which the quad-rotor project run by the ES group is arguably the most prominent example.